Campus Watch demands academic integrity in North American Middle East studies (MES) programs. It reviews and critiques MES bias with the aim of improving education – keeping watch on scores of professors at hundreds of universities. Our campus networks, research specialists and advocates confront the anti-Western politicization of scholarship, intolerance of alternative views, and apologetics for Islamism. Campus Watch respects free speech for all – but insists upon reciprocity.

Impact: Victor Davis Hanson, The Hoover Institution – “Campus Watch sheds light on often volatile and intemperate proclamations.” New York Times – Campus Watch monitoring is responsible for “damaging open inquiry and expression.” Ruth Wisse, Harvard – “[MES] benefit[s] from the presence of Campus Watch.”

Danielpipes.org is one of the most accessed sources of specialized information on the Middle East and Muslim history, with over 69 million page views. Daniel Pipes is founder and president of the Middle East Forum – he has served in five presidential administrations and authored sixteen books on the Middle East, Islamism and related topics. The site offers an archive of his writings, along with video and audio of his latest media appearances, and translations of his works in 38 languages.

Islamist Watch unveils and combats internal Islamist forces that exploit the freedoms of Western democracy to undermine from within. Lawful Islamists – in the media, courts, schools, public squares, and ballot boxes – seek the spread of Shari’a as governing law, although it is incompatible with Western democracy. Islamist Watch aims to make Islamists in suits and ties no more acceptable than ones wearing suicide vests – by countering corporate and governmental support, tracking tainted campaign contributions, and enhancing the presence and influence of anti-Islamist Muslims.

The Israel Victory Project steers U.S. policy toward backing an Israel victory over the Palestinians to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. Decades of what insiders call “peace processing” have left matters worse than when they started. The time has come for a new approach, a complete re-thinking of the problem that draws on Israel’s earlier and successful strategy of deterrence. Stop pressuring Jerusalem to compromise and make “painful concessions.” Instead, support Israeli victory, convincing Palestinians and others that the Jewish state will endure.

Impact: Launched the bipartisan Congressional Israel Victory Caucus (CIVC) and the Knesset Israel Victory Caucus (KIVC), with 32 and 26 members respectively; influenced President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and order the U.S. embassy moved there (according to The Guardian, Al-Monitor, and NPR).

Jihad Intel provides local law enforcement with tools to detect and prevent Islamist terrorism. At the behest of Islamists and leftists, references to Islam have been removed from law enforcement and national security training materials. Law enforcement needs to know what to look for while searching apartments, cars, computer hard-drives and personal effects of prisoners. Jihad Intel’s gratis database provides them with background, image identifiers and intelligence for over 150 Islamic terror groups, including 87 image identifiers for ISIS.

The Legal Project protects the public discussion of Islam and related topics – if Islamism can not be discussed, it can not be reformed. The project provides a lifeline to the growing number of individuals whose livelihood and freedom are threatened by predatory Islamist lawsuits and malign government policies. It maintains a legal defense fund and a database of pro-bono/reduced-rate attorneys; raises public awareness of the issue; and educates policy-makers on how they can protect this vital speech.

Impact:Djemila Benhabib, author – “From now on freedom of expression will be better off in our democratic society. In helping me, the Middle East Forum's Legal Project has played such an important part in that matter.”

The Washington Project works to translate the Forum’s ideas into U.S. policy. It identifies American interests toward the Middle East, Israel and Islamism, and influences policy-makers through intensive educational efforts in the capital. The project currently focuses on reforming UNRWA by re-defining a “Palestine refugee”; designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization; and finding support for an Israel victory over the Palestinians.

Impact: Held 157 separate meetings in the last year with members of Congress of their staff – impacting UNRWA’s policies, countering Muslim Brotherhood infiltration, and helping to prevent unilateral Palestinian statehood in Obama’s final days.

The Forum sponsors webinars, in-person briefings, and conference calls featuring its staff and fellows, former government officials, scholars, journalists, and others with insights into the Middle East and Islamism. Speakers delve deep into critical issues, surpassing what is found in mass media – and always with an eye toward American interests. Most briefings occur along the New York-Philadelphia-Washington, D.C. corridor.

The Education Fund is a project of the Forum established in 2008 that disburses about $2 million annually in separately earmarked funds to researchers, writers, anti-Islamist Muslims, investigators and activists who work to further the Forum’s mission – promoting American interests in the Middle East and protecting Western values from Middle Eastern threats.

Funds go to some 80 recipients, individuals and organization alike, in the United States and around the world, including: Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, India, Israel, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom. Some of their efforts are kept confidential to prevent their being exposed to danger.

The Forum supplements its writings with in-depth webinars, briefings and conference calls. Non-partisan specialists take on the Middle East's most controversial and difficult issues with an eye toward American interests – questioning assumptions, provoking thought, and offering new solutions.

The Forum’s activism gets things done – in Congress, on campus, in court, in corporate boardrooms, and beyond. Forum activists have held 157 meetings with members of Congress or their staff, impacting UNRWA’s policies and Muslim Brotherhood infiltration, and promoting Israel victory. It has also won legal victories over Islamists; exposed Islamist-tainted politicians; persuaded corporations to end funding of Islamist groups; and uncovered San Francisco State University’s malign relationship with a Hamas-linked West Bank university.

Middle East Forum activists launch public campaigns to expose, embarrass and pressure Islamist-tainted politicians and corporations, and biased educational institutions, after friendly educational entreaties are refused.

Impact: We were twice attacked by one of the world’s largest charities after we launched a campaign against the Silicon Valley Community Foundation to stop its donations to Islamist groups. Our evidence shows SVCF supporting organizations that “regularly give platforms to speakers who incite hatred against women, Jews, Christians, and the LGBTQ community.”

The Forum Blog brings experts together, virtually, at one convenient blog-like site – a daily must-read for folks seriously interested in the Middle East, and the go-to gathering place when major events occur. A diverse range of specialists participate as members. They review, analyze and debate a wide array of issues, from major regional developments to boutique issues. Entries are short, interesting and controversial, educating policy-makers and the general public.

Full-text of every Quarterly issue since its founding in 1994. A valuable resource for historians and researchers. Read an interview with Charles Krauthammer from 1994; an article by Bernard Lewis from 1998; and commentary by Michael Rubin from 2007.

The Middle East Quarterly, founded in 1994, has become America's most authoritative journal of Middle Eastern affairs. Policymakers, opinion-makers, academics, and journalists turn first to the Quarterly, for in-depth analysis of the rapidly-changing landscape of the world's most volatile region.

The Quarterly, a peer-reviewed publication, welcomes submissions of original articles, and will consider pre-publication of chapters from forthcoming books. Priority is given to timely articles impacting today's critical issues. Detailed guidelines are provided.

Daniel Pipes is founder and publisher of the Quarterly; Efraim Karsh is its editor. They lead the Quarterly’s 17-member Board of Editors, which includes professors, think-tank experts, and former government officials.

Over the past year, Forum experts were quoted 1,226 times by 93 publications, from Agence France Press to The Washington Post. President Daniel Pipes was mentioned in The Economist; and interviewed by media in France, Germany, Italy and Russia; director Gregg Roman and fellow Raymond Stock appeared on Al-Jazeera; fellow Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi was quoted in the New York Times, the Jerusalem Post and the Washington Post, and on CNN; Campus Watch director Winfield Myers was quoted in the Los Angeles Times.

The Forum has been led by Daniel Pipes since its founding in 1994. Its global staff – working 24/7/365 from Philadelphia, as well as Atlanta, Boston, Jerusalem, San Francisco, Tel Aviv, and Washington, D.C. – includes scholars, authors, former government officials, political activists, attorneys, editors, and development professionals.

Erdogan's Interesting New Top Mayors

New Ankara mayor Mustafa Tuna (left) and the man he replaced after 23 years on the job, Melih Gokcek.

Ankara, Turkey's capital, has a population of about five million. Istanbul, the country's biggest city and commercial capital, has more than 15 million inhabitants. Turkey's top two cities have since 1994 been uninterruptedly run by elected mayors who feature various blends of religious conservatism, nationalism and Islamism. Recently, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan thought it was time for a changing of the guard in both cities; but the change looks more like old wine in a new bottle.

Melih Gokcek, the eccentric nationalist and Islamist mayor of Ankara, a loyal devotee of Erdogan, has run the capital for 23 years. During his reign, he did not miss a single opportunity to get into verbal fights with half the Turkish nation in addition to "Turkey's foreign enemies." In 2014, during Israel's Operation Protective Edge, when large crowds of Turks regularly attacked Israel's diplomatic missions in Ankara and Istanbul -- with hundreds of angry Turks throwing rocks and trying to break into the diplomatic compounds -- Gokcek was quoted as saying: "We will conquer the despicable murderers' consulate".

In a television debate in 2015, Gokcek claimed that if he gets killed, Israel's Mossad should be held responsible. In August 2016, he claimed that the United States had subcontracted Israel to perform seismic tests to cause earthquakes in and around Turkey. In October 2016, he once again claimed that the earthquakes in Turkey were the work of the U.S. and Israel -- conspiracies plotted against Turkey by foreign powers.

Melih Gokcek was a favorite of Turkish cartoonists during his 23-year stint as mayor of Ankara.

In February 2017 Gokcek claimed that the mild earthquake off Canakkale province on Turkey's northern Aegean coast was the work of foreign powers who wanted to topple Erdogan's government. He called on the Turkish Armed Forces to take measures on the Aegean Sea. "At the moment," he said, "The planned conspiracy against Turkey is to cause economic collapse by means of an earthquake in Istanbul". Recently, in September, Gokcek, in his Twitter account, called on Muslim believers to pray that disasters worse "than the Irma and Harvey hurricanes" take place.

All that usual "more royalist than the royals" behavior did not help him keep his seat. Erdogan pressed for the resignation of a number of mayors in his party, including the mayors of Ankara and Istanbul, and Gokcek grudgingly had to step down. Who ideally should replace the man loved by religious fanatics but hated by liberals and seculars?

Erdogan's party administration, under the president's orders, "elected" a district mayor, Mustafa Tuna, already running a township of Ankara, Sincan, with barely 500,000 inhabitants. Ostensibly, the selection of a quiet man with a degree from a U.S. university to be the mayor of Ankara does not tell much. But in Turkey there are always the semantics of Islamist politics.

Sincan, a bastion of Islamism, is where Erdogan chose to hold a counter-rally during the 2013 Gezi Park protests and hold mass trials of those accused of taking part in last year's failed coup.

Sincan is not an ordinary district. It is associated with (sometimes militant) forms of political Islam. The township is a stronghold for right-wing clubs, Islamic sects, and Islamist political parties. This came to light most famously in the political crisis of February 1997, when the tanks of the then-secular military rolled through the district as a warning to the people to respect the secular principles enshrined in the Turkish constitution.

More recent incidents included pouring green paint over the statue of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in the central square (Ataturk was the founder of modern Turkey and the architect of its secular regime; green is the color often associated with Islamic jihad). Another incident that drew the ire of the then secular military was the staging of a "Quds [Jerusalem] Evening" by the Sincan Municipality. Leading militant Islamist figures were invited, as well as Iran's ambassador, to the event in which children were seen waging "jihad" while dressed in militant attire and holding fake rifles and bombs.

Istanbul is a different story, but leads to the same conclusion. The outgoing mayor, Kadir Topbas, often gave the impression that he was a mild, pro-peace conservative, refraining from radical talk like that of Ankara's Gokcek. Topbas quickly bowed to Erdogan's pressure and quietly resigned. As in Ankara, city council members, dominated by Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP), chose a district mayor, Mevlut Uysal, as Istanbul's new mayor. While Turks from Istanbul and elsewhere were expecting the new mayor to allow public debate on the pressing problems of this ailing city, Uysal chose rudely to remind the nation what it wanted to forget. Uysal, Istanbul's new mayor, had been one of the lawyers defending Islamist arsonists in what is known as the "Sivas case".

Sivas Massacre

New Istanbul mayor Mevlut Uysal is notorious for being one of the lawyers who defended Islamist arsonists responsible for the 1993 massacre of Turkish intellectuals in Sivas.

On a hot July day in 1993, a group of Turkish intellectuals, mostly Alevis, including prominent writers, musicians, poets and artists, had gathered for a cultural festival at the downtown Hotel Madimak in the central Anatolian city of Sivas. The happy troupe had gathered there to commemorate the 16th-century Alevi poet, Pir Sultan Abdal. Among the intellectuals was one of Turkey's most famous writers and humorists, Aziz Nesin, author of more than 100 books, translated into more than 30 languages. Not long before the assembly in Sivas, and sparking outrage from Islamist groups, Nesin had begun to translate Salman Rushdie's controversial novel, The Satanic Verses into Turkish.

On July 2, shortly after Friday prayers, thousands of devout Sunni Muslims marched to the Hotel Madimak. Chanting "Allahu Akbar" (in Arabic, "Allah is the Greatest"), they broke through the weak police barricades surrounding the hotel. When they reached it, they set it alight, while policemen allegedly stood by and watched. The city's Islamist mayor refused to send firefighters to put out the blaze. The assault took eight hours, without any intervention from the police, military or fire department. When what would later be internationally known as the "Sivas massacre" ended and the mob dispersed, 35 people, mostly Alevi intellectuals as well as a Dutch anthropologist, were killed, along with two hotel employees. Two of the arsonists also died.

In the following days, 190 people were arrested and charged with "attempting to establish a religious state by changing the constitutional order." After a trial, 33 suspects were sentenced to death, 99 received between 28 months and 15 years, and 37 were acquitted.

As Turkey later (in 2002) abolished the death penalty, the death sentences were commuted. Each defendant received 35 life sentences, one for each murder victim, and additional time for other crimes. These 33 convicts who ended up with life sentences -- except one who died in prison -- are currently the only ones still serving time for their crimes; the other defendants were paroled early or released after completing their sentences. In March 2012, due to the statute of limitations, the Sivas massacre case against five remaining defendants was dropped.

That Uysal, Istanbul's new mayor, was one of the lawyers defending the arsonists in the trial is not surprising in Erdogan's increasingly Islamist Turkey. But in humanitarian matters, Islamists never cease to shock. Speaking to the press, Uysal said that he has never regretted defending the arsonists in Sivas. "It is my opinion that both those who lost their lives there and the defendants were the victims," he said.

So, the man simply thinks that no one was to blame for the loss of life. In Islamist Turkey, this kind of sick thinking always receives a reward.

Burak Bekdil is an Ankara-based political analyst and a fellow at the Middle East Forum.